Writing Poetry can Endanger Your Health Part Ten by Dave Jaffe

The Poet As Agitator by Dave Jaffe -Section One



    In the 1930's, a young black poet wandered the busy city streets of France's major metropolis. His name was Aime Fernand David Cesaire. He had come to this huge city of Paris on a scholarship from his birthplace of Martinique. It was a tiny Island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea and was a colony of France.
     Growing up in this French-ruled land, Cesaire ran head on into white racism and condescension. A brilliant student, he won a scholarship to France and went to the elite Ecole Normale Superiore in Paris. Here also he came face to face with white racism and French ideas of superiority.
    "In France," wrote the English critic John Berger in the mid-1960's, "it is believed that there are no questions about art which have not already been fully discovered there." This was far more true in the 1930's and the French also assumed that they had answered the questions on many other topics besides the ones asked in the world of the fine arts.
     Cesaire had come to a white France that ruled colonies all over the world. This was true of many other countries at that time including Great Britain. Nearly all these colonies were full of people of colour and most white people back then believed that they and other white people were literally better and superior to all people of colour.
    "We British should never have given up any of our colonies," a janitor from England told me in 1974." Coloured people can't run things the way we do."
     Cesaire challenged this attitude head on. He founded a new school of poetry called 'negritude'. In this new school of literature, black writers examined their own culture and denied their supposed inferiority. "I am black and I am proud," African Americans declared in the 1960's. Negritude was a forerunner of these beliefs.
     Cesaire got married to Suzanne Roussi in 1939n and they had a son together. They returned to Martinique to face French colonialism, censorship and white racism. Cesaire became a teacher but he also wrote a great prose poem. In English its title translates to 'Notebook of a Return to the Native Land'.
     'The wheel is the most beautiful discovery of man and the only one," wrote Cesaire.
    ' there is the sun which turns
    there is the earth which turns
    there is your face which turns
    upon the axle of your throat when you cry.
   

     'Now I have come' Cesaire continued
    ' Once more to this limping life before me,
     no not this life, this death without sense or piety, this death where greatness pitifully fails.'
   
    Cesaire had written a  great poem. He went on to write other books. He entered politics. He was elected as mayor of Martinique's capital city of Fort de France. Later he was elected to be a deputy in the French National Assembly. He joined the French Communist party but left it in the 1950's He became more conservative as he aged.
    Still he remained an anti-racist until he died in 2008. By then white ruled colonies were nearly all gone.Still many black people  faced white racism and poverty. Cesaire used his great poetic gifts to try and free what he called 'this unique people'. He did succeed. He was a great example of the poet as agitator.